The universe is amazing. You are amazing. I am amazing. For we are all one. Everything we are, everything that's ever been and everything that will ever be was all forged in the same moment of creation 13.7bn years ago from an unimaginably hot and dense volume of matter less than the size of an atom. And that is amazing. What happened before then in the Planck epoch is a matter of conjecture; we lack a theory of quantum gravity, though some believe the universe was formed from a collision of two pieces of space and time floating forever in an infinite space, but I feel I'm losing you at this point, which isn't so amazing.

So let's go to the Temple of Karnak at Luxor to watch the sunrise. Because in the beginning was the same light that now reflects the deep hazel of my eyes as I stare into the middle distance. By following this light we have mapped our place among the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way and we have looked backward in time almost to the dawn of creation.

Light is amazing. It is both particles and waves, oscillating electric and magnetic fields propelling each other through space at a finite speed of 299,792,458 metres per second. It's hard for us to comprehend just how fast this is, so here I am in a jet fighter travelling at the speed of sound which is a lot slower but still very fast. And now I'm at Victoria Falls, looking at the rainbow arcing across the sky. Try to imagine the colours of the spectrum as a way into redshift and the invisible light of the Cosmic Microwave Background. I did say try.

High up in the Himalayas we find the circle of life. Every atom of carbon, calcium and oxygen in my body is the same as the carbon, calcium and oxygen everywhere else in the universe, though mine have been arranged rather more photogenically than most. To understand this we have to go to Chile where I can blow bubbles to show how, from quarks and anti-quarks, the first hydrogen and helium atoms were formed 400,000 years after Big Bang, how they coalesced to form galaxies and stars, that in turn burned out into death stars, which created all the elements in the universe today. To imagine the collapse of a star, just watch me blow up an old prison in Rio and then think of something a lot bigger and more powerful. Amazing.

Gravity is the great organisational force of the cosmos; without it we would float around like I am in this Vomit Comet. Everything we know, from the Fish River Canyon here in Namibia, carved over millions of years by droplets of water bound by the equation U=mgh, to my shiny hair that cascades soulfully over my eyes, is subject to the effects of gravity first observed by the Chinese in 1054 as they looked up towards the Crab Nebula from Chaco Canyon, where I now am. But what is gravity? Isaac Newton stated that the gravitational force between two objects is the product of their masses, but we now know his theory of universal gravitation is not correct; rather it is what Einstein called the curvature of spacetime. I've lost you again. But as I stand on the top of a Norwegian mountain with a helicopter hovering overhead, we can only wonder at the gravitational meaning of the Black Hole. In the budget.

Time feels human, but we are only part of Cosmic Time and we can only ever measure its passing. As I stand in front of the great glacier that towers over Lake Argentino, time seems to almost stand still, yet as I explain the effects of entropy in the Namibian desert as sandcastles crumble around me, you can see that the transition from order to chaos can happen almost in the blink of an eye. One day, perhaps in 6bn years, our universe will stop expanding, the sun will cool and die, as all stars must, and everything will collapse in on itself, back into a black hole singularity. I leave you with this last thought: that we, too, will only really die when the universe dies, for everything within it is intrinsically the same. And that if you take this book to bed you are, to all intents and purposes, sleeping with me. Now that is amazing.